DO YOU FIND JOY TOUGHER TO GRASP THESE DAYS? If so, you’re not alone, and that’s important to acknowledge.

On a rainy day walk through the lush Gazzam Lake Nature Preserve on her home turf of Bainbridge Island last week, my friend Hilary commiserated when I told her I was finding it tougher to write regular posts on “Cantwell’s Reef.”

“I like to write about the joys I’ve found living on my island,” I told her as I squished along a muddy trail flanked by arsenals of sword ferns and tall maples thickly upholstered in chartreuse moss. But with the people in charge taking a wrecking ball to the world all around us, joy can be thin on the ground. Just today my brother sent me an apt meme that declared, “This entire presidency is like being tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded pistol.”

Maybe I should share that feeling with all you Reef readers, who are living through the same experience, Hilary suggested. I mulled that and quickly saw the wisdom. Perhaps there’s a “misery loves company” element to it, but it’s more: Friends and loved ones need to support one another through these times of upheaval and uncertainty. Minnesotans bravely modeled how to resist hate and brutality, but there’s a flip side to resisting. We also need to grab joy and celebrate it when we find it.

My joy last week was lunching with Hilary and her husband, Neil, at a cozy Bainbridge pub with Emily, an acquisitions editor at Seattle’s Lake Union Publishing. I had just helped Neil land a book contract for a historical novel on which he had labored for 50 years. This was my first (and likely only) experience as a literary agent. It’s been an interesting bag of new tricks for this old dog to learn. Challenging but, well, joyful in the end.

The joy back home on my little island comes in observing the signs of spring’s pending arrival, such as the watermelon-pink blooms of wild currant outside my cabin’s front door. Or in planting a new quaking aspen tree next to Wee Nooke, my writing hut named after a cottage that Edwin the Boy Scout burned to the ground in a P.G. Wodehouse novel (after he tried to clean the chimney with gunpowder). That book’s, title, coincidentally: “Joy in the Morning.”

This might be the first such aspen (Populus tremuloides) on Center Island, but there are many bordering Shallow Bay on Sucia Island, 18 miles north of here, so it’s almost a native species. I figure the climate difference isn’t much. I’m hoping my new tree will offer both the splendid music of wind-ruffled leaves as well as the joyful autumn glow for which its species is famous.

I’ve said it before and the news headlines just keep hammering home the importance: Take joy where you find it. Share it with everyone around you.

I never expected to be quoting Bad Bunny, but it’s pretty darn true: The only thing more powerful than hate is love. Add joy to that and you’ve really got something.